The next chapter
Be careful what you wish for. To all appearances, Todd Alexander and Jeff Ross had it all — a beautifully renovated house in Sydney’s inner west, successful corporate careers with salaries to match and a great bunch of friends to help them enjoy all the benefits of city living. But that nagging “is that all there is” feeling kept gnawing away, so in 2012 they astonished family and friends by throwing it all in to move to Block Eight, a vineyard and olive grove where they could build accommodation villas at Belford in the Hunter Valley.
What followed has been an extraordinary journey into the highs and lows of country living, which Todd has documented in two memoirs, Thirty Thousand Bottles of Wine and a Pig Called Helga, published in 2019, and the recently released, You’ve Got to be Kidding: A Shedload of Wine & a Farm Full of Goats.
Todd grew up in western Sydney and the Central Coast and studied law before he realised it wasn’t for him. He moved into book retailing and worked as head of buying for Dymocks franchise systems, before spending 12 years leading online sales working for eBay. Jeff grew up in the English Midlands and is an inveterate traveller, who took whatever hospitality jobs generated enough income to fund his next trip. When he eventually settled in Australia, he worked for the young
